Quentin Tarantino Says He’s in ‘No Hurry’ to Direct His Final Film
Fans anticipating Quentin Tarantino‘s final movie may have to wait a bit longer. The filmmaker confirmed that he is not in a rush to shoot a film and has instead been focused on writing and fatherhood for the past few years.
“I’m in no hurry to actually jump into production,” Tarantino said during an interview at the Sundance Film Festival (via Variety). “I’ve been doing that for 30 years. Next month my son turns five, and I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. When I’m in America, I’m writing. When I’m in Israel? I’m an abba, which means father.”
He added, “The idea of jumping on a voyage when they’re too young to understand it is not enticing to me. I kind of want to not do whatever movie I end up doing until my son is at least six. That way he’ll know what’s going on, he’ll be there, and it will be a memory for the rest of his life.”
The director explained that he has been working on a play that will “be probably the next thing I end up doing.” “If it’s a fiasco I probably won’t turn it into a movie,” he noted. “But if it’s a smash hit? It might be my last movie.”
As for why he’s focused on theater rather than film, Tarantino didn’t hold back. The filmmaker responded to a query from the interviewer by launching into a diatribe about the state of movies today.
“That’s a big fucking deal pulling [a play] off, and I don’t know if I can,” he said. “So here we go. That’s a challenge, a genuine challenge, but making movies? Well, what the fuck is a movie now? What — something that plays in theaters for a token release for four fucking weeks? All right, and by the second week you can watch it on television. I didn’t get into all this for diminishing returns.”
He continued, “I mean, it was bad enough in ’97. It was bad enough in 2019, and that was the last fucking year of movies. That was a shit deal, as far as I was concerned, the fact that it’s gotten drastically worse? And that it’s just it’s a show pony exercise. Now the theatrical release, you know, and then like yeah, in two weeks, you can watch it on this [streamer] and that one. Okay. Theater? You can’t do that. It’s the final frontier.”
Tarantino initially announced The Movie Critic as his 10th and final movie. Last year, it was revealed that Brad Pitt had been supposedly tapped for the movie — the collaboration would have reconnected the actor-director duo after working together on 2009’s Inglorious Bastards and 2019’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. However, in April Variety reported that Tarantino had passed on the project and was planning to make something new.
He briefly discussed the film at Cannes in 2023, telling reporters, “I can’t tell you guys [anything] until you see the movie. I’m tempted to do some of the character’s monologues right now, but I’m not going to. Maybe if there were less video cameras. You just have to wait and see.”